Artlog

An exhibition of film installations as well as a selection of photographic works by Julian Rosefeldt.

Open 10- 31 January 2008

Included in the film presentation will be three new works: The Ship of Fools, Unknown Soldier and Requiem will be unveiled. Seventeen still images will be presented alongside the video works. Master use of sound and the moving image on 16 mm film combined with symbolic narratives has positioned Julian Rosefeldt as one of the most important emerging talents working in the medium of video art. Recruiting a large group of technicians and producing elaborate sets, Julian Rosefeldt’s productions are the opposite of the amateurish style so prevalent in contemporary video art. Visually rich moving image is the medium for these evocative and poignant narratives portraying the human condition.

This exhibition will be the first North American solo exhibition of the artist’s work to date. The headline film, The Ship of Fools is a haunting and emotional journey of simultaneous episodes displayed on a four-channel screen which belies the complexities of German patriotism. Shot at the Schloss Sacrow in Potsdam, a highly significant location, the film depicts complex choreographed scenes of an individual in the landscape where symbols of German culture are poetically re-interpreted and presented as existential dramas. Opening up with the score of Richard Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder, the viewer is guided through a series of mysterious landscapes, obscured by darkness, fog and mist and where a lone figure stands waiting. One channel is devoted to a scene of German Shepard dogs chained and barking wildly. Clarity comes fleetingly in one segment, in the form of an eagle escaping from a character’s coat. In another sequence, a figure in the mimicked stance of Caspar David Friedrich’s (1774-1840) great German Romantic painting, Wanderer ueber dem Nebelmeer (Wanderer Above the Sea Fog), 1818 contemplates a beautiful seascape. As a ferry approaches loaded with frenetically flapping German flags, the location transforms into a distinctly German seascape and then as the ferry passes and our figure chooses not board, the seascape and his contemplation returns to the pure vista. In another segment, a man emblazoned with an eagle tattoo on his back, tentatively walks through a ghostly bog as if to cleanse himself. Unsure and directionless, the figure seems to look for guidance or answers as if his past allegiances have failed him Throughout the film, the sound of working dogs barking fades in and out and a sense of anxiety pervades.

The exhibition also includes three previous works Asylum, Lonely Planet and Stunned Man. Stunned Man, part of Rosefeldt’s most acclaimed project “Trilogy of Failure,” humorously deconstructs the underside of modern life, as the audience witnesses an anonymous man vandalize his apartment which is then carefully reassembled, only to be destroyed once again.

Lonely Planet and Asylum both invite reflection on the notion of the The Other and powerfully evoke a sense of human failure. In Asylum, Rosefeldt confronts one of the most pressing issues in Western society, and in Germany in particular: immigration and questions our romanticized view of them. On nine screens, the installation follows diverse ethnic minorities and their struggle to conform or even penetrate in Western society. Exploitation, degradation, and intolerance are treated with the characters repeating senseless actions, such as women cleaning a cactus garden, with methodical and linear camera work that underlines the malaise of his subjects.

In Lonely Planet, the white European man, and by extension, the viewer, is polarized. We follow the protoganist, a Western backpacker played by the artist himself, across an Indian desert, traipsing, alone and quiet who arrives at a city where Bollywood films are being shot, call centers are being managed and crowds and animals congest the streets. With little heed paid to the traveler, the inhabitants and their world suck him into the scene of rich, vibrant color and sound rendering him almost indecipherable at times and nearly lost. The dramatic and beautifully constructed environments composed with rich colors, a tapestry of shadow-play and scenery not only make these delicately surreal dramas of modern life completely sumptuous but further accentuate the artist’s complex approach to the underside of human existence.